How your service desk can drive greater employee productivity

What is Employee Service Management?

Technology has evolved. We see that in our phones, cars, and even our homes. There isn’t much that we have to wait for. Where there once was a handheld map, is now a digital and voice-controlled navigation system. We said goodbye to VHS and hello to instant streaming. You can get anything you want almost instantly, making waiting a past time. We expect more out of our service providers than ever before, and it’s only natural that change has slipped into our professional lives as well. Solutions to our problems are expected right now, not tomorrow. Employee service management is the service desk’s way of fulfilling that need in the workplace.

Think of employee service management quite simply as employee-focused service. Traditionally in IT service management (ITSM), we’ve been accustomed to viewing employees as numbers — tickets that need to be closed. If we take a broader look at service management across the organization and implement service management best practices beyond IT, we can make employees’ jobs easier by giving them the support and resources they need, when and how they need — regardless of the department providing a given service.

Your organization most likely has the building blocks for what you need to carry out a successful employee service management strategy. The processes and best practices are already there in IT.

Provide Employees with the Resources They Need to Succeed

We may not always think about what our employees need to get work done, just that they need to get it done. Employee service management changes that. Its goal is to make work easier for employees by providing them with the resources and solutions they need, where and when they need them. Instead of an employee waiting hours or days for a solution, they can get it within minutes or hours depending on the level of difficulty. Employees are able to perform to their maximum ability, ensuring your business runs as smoothly and efficiently as it can while increasing employee satisfaction. Happy employees = happy customers.

Here are some examples of ways you can build and use a unified service management platform to provide your employees with a more seamless service experience:

A one-stop shop for all support resources and answers via a customized service portal

Once the processes are built out and ready to go, employees will need a way to access these benefits. When we think about access, we aim for ease of access. Samanage and OneLogin have a tight partnership to help facilitate just that. We realize that you have enough passwords to keep up with (between your email, bank account…the list goes on), and we don’t want Samanage to become another forgotten password. With OneLogin, your employees can access everything they need via Single Sign-on, providing them with a seamless experience with their service portal.

In leveraging OneLogin with Samanage, your user base in Samanage will remain up to date with automated provisioning and deprovisioning. This is a huge time saver, as you maintain users in Active Directory, and it can remain your source of truth to your instance of Samanage.

Smart Technology Facilitates Seamless Service Delivery

Automation and artificial intelligence have arrived in the service desk, but we still wonder — how much time do these processes actually save us in the long run? With these processes, you can save your agents time, offer efficient self-service for employees, and provide benefits to the organizations.

Ticket Automations

Routing automations send every ticket to the right place, so the appropriate technicians can get to work immediately upon the submission of a ticket. You can route tickets based on departments, categories, priorities, and more.

Prioritize tickets with AI

How many times a day do your technicians answer a password reset request? Smart technology makes sure tickets with a high priority are escalated up the chain so that they’re seen first.

Suggested Solutions

Suggested solutions help you maximize the power of your knowledge base, connecting appropriate solutions wherever they apply to tickets. This is beneficial to requesters and technicians. If a ticket looks familiar, technicians won’t have to go digging for the article. In the same fashion, if a requester opens the service portal and starts to type into the search bar, they’ll see any applicable solutions articles pop up.

Employees spend an average of 520 hours per year on mundane tasks that could be automated.

The ultimate goal for these processes is to have your service desk work smarter, not harder. Now, your employees have the time and resources they need to get the job they were hired to do done. Plus, there are literally hundreds of ways you can automate your service desk.

Learn more

Want to learn more about a smarter approach to your service management strategy? We’re always here to help. Get your Samanage free trial here and learn more about OneLogin for Samanage here.

About the Author

With more than 10 years in the industry, Matt Cox is a lover of creating technical solutions and customer implementations. As the Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting at Samanage, he leads the talented team of solutions consultants who work with customers of all sizes and across many different industries to create tailored service management solutions using ITSM and ITIL best practices.

About the Author

With more than 10 years in the industry, Matt Cox is a lover of creating technical solutions and customer implementations. As the Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting at Samanage, he leads the talented team of solutions consultants who work with customers of all sizes and across many different industries to create tailored service management solutions using ITSM and ITIL best practices.